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Architect – Rethinking Spot Instances by Solving the Preemption Problem

9 pointsby pojntfx4 months ago

1 comment

pojntfx4 months ago
Hey HN! We&#x27;ve built a system that lets you run any application on spot instances without worrying about preemption. It works by running VMs on top of VMs - without the need for nested virtualization or hardware acceleration support - by integrating our open-source projects: Drafter (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;drafter">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;drafter</a> - handles VM live migration), PVM (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;linux-pvm-ci">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;linux-pvm-ci</a> - enables nested virtualization without hardware support), and Silo (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;silo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;silo</a> - provides efficient live storage migration over the public internet). The cool part is that we can migrate workloads between spot instances faster than they get preempted, with no dropped connections - even across different cloud providers and regions.<p>While there are other solutions that try to handle spot instance preemption through checkpointing, we take a fundamentally different approach by making preemption irrelevant through continuous state capture and seamless migration. We showed this off at KubeCon NA 2024 by migrating a Redis pod between AWS, GCP, and Azure while maintaining active client connections.<p>All core components are open source, including our Firecracker patches (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;firecracker&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main-live-migration-pvm">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;loopholelabs&#x2F;firecracker&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main-live-m...</a>). We&#x27;re currently in the process of launching with GitHub Actions runners that can safely run on spot instances (which are 75%+ cheaper!) without risk of interruption, even for long-running builds and stateful workloads at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;architect.run&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;architect.run&#x2F;</a>.<p>More info in the linked blog post! Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the technical implementation and potential use cases.